M4A to MP3

An M4A is a sound file in Apple’s favourite wrapper, holding AAC sound. Voice Memos saves them, so do GarageBand exports and the songs you ripped yourself. Many car stereos, old players and web forms want an MP3 instead.

A voice memo is mono, so its MP3 is mono too, made at half the bitrate you pick: a memo at 192 kbps becomes an MP3 of 96 kbps, as good as a stereo song at 192, and half the size. Because the memo is private, it is worth knowing it stays on your device the whole time.

The tags of an M4A come along into the MP3: its title, artist, album and cover art, which is what a car stereo or a phone shows while it plays. In our tests a tagged M4A with a cover came out as an MP3 with all four.

The MP3 also tells players how much silence the encoder added, so the song plays at its real length and gapless. In Safari before version 26 the file is decoded by the browser itself and the tags are not kept; the page says so when that happens.

An M4A and an MP3 are both compressed, and compressing sound twice loses a little each time, so the MP3 can’t be better than the M4A it came from. Take High (192 kbps) for songs and Best (320 kbps) when the M4A was a good one; for a voice memo, Standard (128 kbps) is plenty.

A 4-minute M4A of 6.9 MB became an MP3 in about 2 seconds on a recent laptop.

Songs bought long ago from the iTunes Store as protected M4P files, and Apple Music downloads, are locked to your account, and nothing here unlocks them. A file like that says it can’t be read. M4A files you made or ripped, and the ones iTunes sells without protection today, work.